October 2005

Viewing posts from October , 2005

however, i don’t think i’ll be migrating the photo album just yet, as the code looks complicated and i won’t be able to create any new tool to read the G2 information. besides, G1 works alright so far.

took my mom to the yacht club today. there was a photography session for the youth teams sailing for the raja muda. due to most of them being tardy / missing, i had to pose as a sailor. 😛 kinda disheartening when they ask you to look away, preferring to take shots of your back/ass. it’s as if i’m not sailor material.

well, that is true. haven’t sailed for so long that i’ve forgotten the ropes. literally.

took the entire day sorting out my computer stuff into proper boxes and drawers. there’s a lot more to clean up before Hari Raya.

haven’t even had a chance to play any games today. 🙁 can’t blame the spring cleaning, cuz it all started with me messing around with some MT plugins at work (it was the last day of work before the hols and no one was doing anything seriously). stumbled upon the Gallery Link plugin, which is rather basic as it is, but provides ground for improvement.

so here i am, improving it. 😛

to avoid my main page from getting messed up while i experiment with this, i only modified the individual entry template to show the pictures. i’ll probably add some ‘sample’ functionality for the main page later.

kinda amazing how they manage to keep those derelict vehicles from falling apart driving so fast.

oh well. on another note, i seem to have botched my leave application for this coming holiday season. i seriously thought that i’d be on leave starting the 31st, but according to the system i’ll only be away 2nd onwards.

that means i have to come to work on monday! argh!

but just to double check, i’d better dig up my submitted leave form and see if it’s really true. :

and here’s some updates on my pc status. as mentioned before, i’ve brought down the [CPU] frequency back to the original so that i can test each overclocked level / component thoroughly. so at the moment, i’m seeing how the overclocked [GPU] fares. it’s currently running at 450MHz/350MHz, which is quite alright. 3dmark03 scores show a +1000 point improvement. and with my SATA drive all nicely set up, BF2 load times have never been faster. so far, i’m always the first person to enter a map after its loaded, so the attack chopper is usually mine, all mine! 😀 😀 😀

7 random facts:
1. sits at the computer ’til he falls asleep every night
2. likes to eat out with friends
3. has never confessed his love to anyone before they do (family doesn’t count)
4. almost broke his back doing a backflip into a pool
5. has yet to break a bone
6. addicted to work, but lazy
7. horny, constantly 😛

finished transferring all my “goods” from my old hard drive to the new one. it’s now unplugged and idling in my chassis at the moment, while i figure out what exactly i should do with it.

with my PSU fan speed on minimum, my computer is soooooo quiet now. means i can make it work while i sleep. 😀

think i should get a chassis fan just to help the airflow a bit. as it is now, with the casing closed up, the cpu and mobo idles at about 38 degrees. could be better i think.

anyway, took the car straight to DU today to fix its dire overheating problem. before this i had to refill the radiator every two weeks, but since i took a bad bump hit in bangsar a few days ago, i’ve had to do that every day pretty much.

seems that the steel pipe that runs through the engine is badly rusted, and one end of it, where the hole is plugged by a rubber stopper (which when removed allows you to flush the cooling system), is so thinned out that water is seeping through. the mechanic had to saw that edge off to plug the leak.

hopefully that would be the end of my overheating woes. but i’ll still carry that big bottle of water in my trunk, just in case.

since i was already there, i serviced the car as well. and since i was in pj, i took the liberty of spending the next two hours looking for parking in pj state to pick up my new mykad. daym, i’ve forgotten the feeling of a newly serviced car. and daym, i feel much better having picked up my mykad after delaying for 3 months (another few days and i’d have to pay a hundred ringgit fine). ooh, and i had my breaks cleaned out as well. maybe the handbrake turn will work this time.

Now a while back Merv had given me a spare Smart Tag unit. For those who don’t know what it is, it’s a device used to facilitate electronic payment at toll booths seamlessly without having to stop your car. The appropriate charge will be debited from your Touch’N’Go card (the item that stores your actual prepaid cash value) which is slotted into the Smart Tag unit, and then you can drive on through.

So I was driving to the mechanic’s and had to go through a toll. Whipped out the Smart Tag unit, drove up to the lane, and a siren sounded whilst the electronic scoreboard by the booth flashed “Unit error – contact admin” or something along those lines. Feeling much chagrined I looked about as a toll worker nearby who had witnessed what occurred came up to me and checked the unit. He then told me, “Battery sudah habis.” (the battery’s flat)

Great…forgot to check that part. With much signaling to the cars who were stuck behind me, everyone inched back to allow me to reverse and go through a Touch’N’Go lane instead.

Learning my lesson then, I made sure to get a brand new battery, popped it into the unit and voila, all set. I didn’t have the chance to test the unit until a week or so later when I had to take a drive towards Kajang. As I approached the Smart Tag lane (there’s typically only _one_ smart tag lane per toll collection center), this Silver Waja came up behind me at high speed, tailgating me very closely. I raised my eyebrows at that but resolved not to lose my temper at another idiotic Malaysian driver (hey, it is Ramadhan after all).

We approached the sensor, there was a beep and voila, I was let through! As I drove away though, I was puzzled since the electronic scoreboard by the sensor showed my Touch’N’Go balance at slightly above 20 Ringgit. I could’ve sworn I still had over 50 Ringgit still on it. I also noticed the Waja stuck at the Smart Tag booth, and was going, “Hah, sucker. That’s retribution for tailgating me like a lunatic driver just as we’re approaching the lane.

My drive toward Kajang proceeded and I hit the second toll collection centre, zoomed into the Smart Tag lane and…a loud siren sounded and the electronic scoreboard showed, “Unit Error!” The expletives that came out of my mouth are not suitable to be shown here. Suffice to say I was extremely annoyed. Reversed the car, went into the Touch’N’Go lane and…hey, I’ve got more then 50 ringgit still in my card.

As I drove away I then realised what must have occurred at the first toll collection center. My Smart Tag unit was obviously faulty in some manner (still not sure why) and that idiot driving the silver Waja had followed so close behind me that it was HIS Smart Tag unit which had caused the toll barrier to go up and let me through. After my car went through the barrier came down once more. And the way the cards function is that they can’t be used again for a short period of time (as I understand it). So he was totally stuck.

On hindsight I do feel a little guilty about what occurred. So if you’re the driver of the silver Waja, I’ll buy you a teh tarik to make up for it. I still say you’re an idiot driver nonetheless though, since you enjoy tailgating that much when we’re already about to come to a near stop.

So anyway, this is a rant against those clowns at Rangkaian Segar Sdn Bhd (the company that sells Touch’N’Go and Smart Tag). Seriously, it’s time you people buck up and talk to the different toll operators. Right now a typical major sized toll collection center will have two Touch’N’Go lanes and one Smart Tag lane. I’d strongly urge them to convert all three to Smart Tag lanes but WITH Touch’N’Go sensors on each lane. If a person’s Smart Tag unit doesn’t function, then they can at least use the Touch’N’Go card and drive on. Right now if it fails we’ve got no choice but to invoke the infamous “gostan” maneuver to get out of the dratted lane. Yeah this may seem detrimental to those who exclusively use Smart Tag alone but hey, we’re trying to promote electronic payment and seamlessness at Toll booths remember? (if you want to experience what it’s like these days, try hitting the Ipoh North and South toll booths during any festive season, as well as the KL toll exit for the KL-Seremban highway)

It’s bad enough you’re still charging an exorbitant price for Smart Tag units (what is it these days? RM180?) considering the fact that it costs what…RM15-20 to manufacter the thing? It was a sad day when the Malaysian government gave you a near virtual monopoly for the bulk of prepaid electronic payment systems in Malaysia. You can try to deny it all you want, but when the Government _APPROVED_ Touch’N’Go functions for all of our Malaysian Identity Cards, what do you think the implacation is?

add: managed to install everything without much difficulty. may have laid on a bit too much arctic silver on my cpu than recommended. altho the fan is big, it’s really more of a silent fan than a performance fan, only running at 1300 rpm.

at first i tried to manually up the FSB by about 10MHz. it went well till a few minutes later, crashing with a nice big blue screen while i was running the torture test on prime95. guess i should’ve foresaw my experimentative-nature and bought performance RAM. gave up trying to figure out the quirks and just used the motherboard’s ‘easy-overclock’ to push everything by 10%.

seems to be fine so far. at the same time, i’m trying to push the speed of my video card (9800 Pro) to match 9800 XT speeds. there has been talk of Pro cards carrying the R360 GPU used on the XTs, and while changing my GPU fan i wiped off the thermal grease and took a peek and yahoo there it was: R360 emblazoned across the shiny surface of the chip.

so here i am, running my CPU at 3.3GHz. and GPU at 412MHz (with video memory at 350MHz).

on hindsight, i should’ve bought some cleaner to get rid of the original thermal grease from the CPU and GPU. and examining my video card closer, it’s would be able to fit the ATI Silencer 3, a vga cooler made for the 9800 XT. although priced the same, 3 definitely beats 1.

planning to go to low yat with fish tomorrow afternoon. i’ll be a little late from work though, having to do some conversion stuff. planning to pick up a dvd burner, and get my faulty memory replaced. wanna look for a vga silencer for my vid card too.

monday: ordered a 200gb sata1 drive and an extra gig of ram from merv who visited low yat that day. went to his place after work to pick up the goods only to end up playing mahjong and breaking fast at nirwana’s (an excellent banana leaf restaurant in bangsar). i should’ve had more drinks after that, but i didn’t and suffered the next day. didn’t even manage a good night’s sleep because some GIRL needed to download something so i had to leave my noisy pc on overnight. *grr* oh, and tiffany got me NERDS! yay!

tuesday: sore eyes, sore throat. took the afternoon off. found 1/2 a gig of ram to be busted, so that makes two things i need to bring back to cycom. tried the F.E.A.R. singleplayer demo: freaky! brought this website down to transfer data to the new hard drive. now that my original 200 gig is formatted as native freebsd ufs2, i don’t have to worry about corrupted downloads anymore.

today: data is being transferred back to the server at home as we speak. 😀 i hope it’ll be done by the time i get home so that i can get rid of my current system drive which is the cause of the noise. the sata should give me some performance boost as well. ^_^